


Crowns & Coffee Cups

by eyra



Series: Crowns & Coffee Cups [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Chronic Illness, Headaches & Migraines, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, M/M, Marauders, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Modern Era, Sick Remus Lupin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:53:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29828001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyra/pseuds/eyra
Summary: There's the wild, hedonistic James, all wicked grins and bright eyes behind his trademark glasses, and then there's the quiet, deliberate James with his low voice and a big, warm hand on Remus's chest, trying to feel for a fever beneath the cotton of his t-shirt and Remus thinks, as he closes his eyes to the touch, that both James's are rather wonderful but this one - this one is his.Remus gets ill, sometimes. James is always there.
Relationships: Remus Lupin/James Potter
Series: Crowns & Coffee Cups [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2204058
Comments: 10
Kudos: 55





	Crowns & Coffee Cups

**Author's Note:**

> A short scene for a Wednesday night, for my #1 guilty pleasure pairing. I have absolutely no idea why I felt the need to write this today - I simply adore any and all iterations of James Potter. x

"You look horrendous."

"Thanks, Pete," Remus murmurs from where he's slumped in his armchair in the common room, next to the roaring fire. The flames dance in the grate and lick at the glowing coals. Remus shivers.

"Been on the drink again?" Peter counters, around a mouthful of Skittles.

"Ha, ha."

He hates Peter a little, in that moment. For the way he's chewing on the sweets and how the disgusting, tacky noises are going straight to Remus's throbbing head. For the way Peter always seems to forget - somehow, even after so long - that this happens, sometimes, and that Remus is many years past joking about it. _"It just happens, sometimes,"_ Remus had told them all, in First Year, when James had found him heaving into a toilet on a fourth floor corridor after Chemistry one morning. He'd had the tests, as a child; the poking and the prodding, blood in little plastic tubes with his name scrawled on the side of them in black marker. Nothing ever came up, really; _"It might just happen, sometimes,"_ a disinterested doctor had said to an eleven-year-old Remus and his fretting, anxious mother, and it wasn't until Fourth Year that they'd finally found a prescription strong enough to ward off the hot, pounding headaches, so that he might keep the roiling nausea at bay. He kept the tablets in a small pillbox inlaid with tiny red garnets and carried it with him always; James gave it to him two summers ago.

"Have you taken your pill?"

James is looming over him now, all broad shoulders and a pinch behind the bridge of his round glasses. The fire glints off the enamel of his Head Boy badge, pinned to the blazer he hasn't taken off yet. Remus frowns up at him and nods.

"Yeah," he mutters, then clenches his jaw against an ugly, lurching swell of nausea. He closes his eyes at that, and sinks further into the armchair, and breathes heavily through his nose. He hears Sirius say something from over by the window; something about dinner, he thinks, and then there's a hand on his thigh - as he knew there would be - and a low answer, deep voice and even, steady cadence.

"I'll put him to bed."

The others must leave, at some point; he hears the wet, gluey chewing of Peter's sweets as they pass him, and then the gentle clack of the common room door closing behind them, and then that singular, deafening thing; the absolute surety with which James regards him, every time this happens. Brow furrowed, lips pursed, eyes incongruously kind and even.

"Bad one?" James murmurs, still crouched there on the rug in front of the armchair; still a large, warm hand on the woollen fabric of Remus's school trousers.

Remus nods, and shivers again in his jumper. There are hands grasping him under his armpits then, lifting him from the chair and it's a wonder to Remus - as it always is, as it always has been - how James can move him so bodily and yet with so much tenderness. He's taller and broader than Remus, admittedly, but there's still something Herculean in the way he whips Remus up to standing as if he might weigh nothing at all; the way he draws him up, and steadies him, and keeps a sure, guiding hand on his lower back - or his waist, sometimes - as he walks him up the winding stone stairs to the dormitory. There's a wonderful safety in it all; should Remus stumble - as he does, on occasion - there's a quick, steady hand to catch him. Should he lag, or have need to pause on the first landing and bow his head to breath evenly through his nose for a count, the hand runs up to lay firmly on the back of his neck. Such a weight to it; so warm, so even. James watches him silently today, as ever, when he stops to take his rest halfway up the stairs, and then his stomach seizes again, and he feels James take him by the elbow and lead him on, upwards.

"I'm going to be sick," Remus says through clenched teeth, but James doesn't hurry them. He never does. He nods, and says that he knows, and there's one hand back on Remus's waist now whilst the other still cups his elbow and then they're in the dormitory, and James steers him calmly towards the bathroom at the end of the room, across the way from Peter's bed.

It's never-ending. James helps Remus to his knees in the single stall, and crouches behind him as he wretches painfully into the bowl; it's pea and ham soup from their lunch earlier, and the sight of it against the porcelain - green and white and pink, in a horrid, thin paste - makes Remus's cheeks burn with shame.

"Don't apologise," James says serenely, moments before Remus is about to attempt it, and Remus nods and heaves again, and feels the cords of the muscles in his sides contract painfully, already sore.

He always tries to apologise when it's like this. James always tells him not to. It's always James, too; from the beginning, James. James on the fourth floor corridor after Chemistry that first morning. James leading him out of lessons in Third Year to guide him back to the common room. James making strong coffees for him - Remus is sure the caffeine helps him, somehow - and holding his cup to his lips, and letting him drink from it slowly. James's big, steady hands coaxing him into bed, bringing the covers up around him, reading to him and quietly pulling the curtains closed to block out the ugly, agonising daylight. Always James.

" _James_ ," Remus pants, a whisper against the hollow of the bowl, his sweaty forehead resting on the itchy wool of his sleeve, arm propped over the seat.

"Yes," James says quietly, evenly. There's a hand on the back of his neck again, and then: "I'm here."

Remus whimpers at that, and empties whatever was left of the contents of his stomach in a final, burning groan that has him hacking noisily into the toilet, each wracking cough echoing off the old, broken tiles of the cubicle and sending new waves of thunder through the chambers of his pounding, aching skull.

"Finished?" James asks, and Remus mumbles something in return, and then James is standing in the cubicle to first flush the toilet, and then to coax Remus back up to a sort of half-stand, half-lean that lets him limp back out into the bedroom. He can feel sweat beaded on his brow, and down the back of his shirt under his jumper; the cotton sticks to his skin, clinging to him in the most revolting way. His mouth is tacky and sour, like he's been at Peter's Skittles. "Arms up," James says quietly as they reach the armoire; a towering, oaken thing they've all shared since First Year. Remus obliges, and stands limply there as James tugs first his jumper and then his button-down from him, thumbing the zip of his slacks open and helping Remus step out of them. He works wordlessly, pulling a pair of pyjama trousers - _are they Remus's?_ \- from the wardrobe, and a clean t-shirt, and then he's dressing him smartly and without fuss, and Remus offers him a tired smile in gratitude.

It's James's bed they stop at. It almost always is; something about the air being better here, by the window, James says. Better to clear Remus's throbbing head, and keep the nausea at bay. And something about the mattress, James thinks. "The mattress on your bed is terrible, Remus," he'd said abruptly one day at breakfast, sipping at his black coffee. "We should swap."

They did try. First, James and Sirius tried to heave Remus's mattress over to James's then-empty bed frame, and by then Remus had admitted that yes, it was a little lumpy; there was a strange hillock in the middle of it that Remus always felt he was having to balance himself on in the night, precariously, lest he slip down either one side of it or the other and end up huddled right on the edge of the bed, clinging to his covers so as not to fall. The bed frames had been different, though, as it had turned out; Remus thinks his was newer, and had been brought in to replace a broken one that at one time had matched the other three frames in the room. James's mattress wouldn't fit on Remus's new bed, and Sirius had huffed in annoyance at having to drag it back over to where they'd originally lifted it from and then James had been frowning, and shrugging across at Remus, who was standing awkwardly by the window and feeling like a spare part.

"We'll just swap beds," James had said simply, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Remus had said no, on account of his bed being nearest the fireplace which he treasured in the winter, and - although he didn't say it - a reluctance to prise James and Sirius away from one another, such as they were nestled together in the centre of the dormitory in twin beds, barely six feet apart. He'd worried, at the time, that Sirius would see this as the gravest of affronts, and would whinge something chronic at having to share such close quarters with Remus rather than James, with whom he always seemed so eager to stay up late into the night with, conspiring and laughing quietly about things that Remus and Peter couldn't hear. It wouldn't have mattered so much by Sixth Year, when James - without explanation, and with something of a hurt reception from Sirius that hung around for weeks and made things uncomfortable and strange - had pulled his own bed frame, mattress and all, away from the centre of the room; away from Sirius, so they were no longer within arm's or whisper's reach of one another, and a good deal closer to Remus's, by the fireplace. "I get cold," he'd said flatly when Sirius eventually brought it up, cross and lashing out in the middle of some argument or other, and that had been that. Not even Sirius dared push him any further, that time. He had a way of speaking, James, that simply brokered no discussion once he'd decided that a consensus had been reached, or that a point had been driven into the ground and could no longer provide any further diversion for the group. It was a flat, low thing; a tone he used that signalled to the rest of them that they must move on, and was usually accompanied by James pushing his glasses further up his nose and going back to whatever book he was reading that day, or scrawling in his pages of essays and notes.

Remus hadn't questioned it when James had first taken him not to his own bed by the fireplace, but to the bed - with the good mattress - by the window, and neatly tugged back the covers so that Remus might slip into them. Maybe James had used that tone of his, Remus sometimes wonders; maybe he'd made it clear that there was simply no discussion to be had, and that this was the way things were going to be. Maybe that's why Remus hadn't questioned it. Or perhaps it had been the way James had tucked him under covers smelling of tobacco and old paper and the suds of his rich, foamy shower gel, and brushed Remus's hair away from his sticky brow with a big, steady hand. Maybe that's why.

"How's your head, Remus?" James says quietly now, perching himself on the side of the bed as Remus rests back into the feather pillows. There's a glass of water on the bedside table - _did James fill that?_ \- and James brings it to Remus's lips, as he always does, and holds it there whilst Remus sips from it. "Tell me honestly," he mutters.

"Quite bad," Remus whispers in return, taking another sip of the cool water. "Took my pill a bit late."

James sighs at that, and disappears silently back into the bathroom. Remus knows what he's doing; an aspirin chaser for the main course. It helps, sometimes; something about kicking the first pill up a gear, and patching over the bits the prescription medicine didn't quite reach when Remus swallowed it down at the first pangs of discomfort behind his eyes that afternoon. He reappears a moment later, leaning down to slip the two round caplets between Remus's lips; carefully, wordlessly. There's another glug from the glass of water then, James inching a warm hand round the back of Remus's neck to steady him, and then: "Would you like me to read to you?"

It's no less thrilling than it was the first time he offered, months ago, sitting casually by Remus's bedside the morning after a particularly bad night, with one leg crossed artfully over the other and a cup of black coffee balanced easily on the chair arm. He'd picked a book from the pile on his bedside table, and licked a finger so that he might more swiftly leaf to the page he was looking for. It had been some sort of poetry, Remus remembers; verses in a language he didn't know, but with a rhythm and a flow to it that was unmistakably dactylic, and Remus had been at pains to fall asleep to him, so warm and even was his voice, like the low, glowing embers in the grate of the fire. 

It's a novel tonight. Remus doesn't know it; something about a travelling caravan in Jordan, and camels, and a main character whose name rolls off James's tongue like honey. He reads quietly, unhurriedly; so controlled and measured, as he is in all things when it comes to Remus. Aching surety, persisting steadiness. Remus wonders at that, sometimes. When he sees James tearing down the hallway outside the library with Sirius, cackling after him, or laughing with Peter over dinner and a joke that Remus was too tired to follow. There's the wild, hedonistic James, all wicked grins and bright eyes behind his trademark glasses, and then there's the quiet, deliberate James with his low voice and a big, warm hand on Remus's chest, trying to feel for a fever beneath the cotton of his t-shirt and Remus thinks, as he closes his eyes to the touch, that both James's are rather wonderful but this one - this one is his.

"James," he murmurs, at some natural break in James's prose.

"Hm?"

Remus watches him. He's still perched there, on the edge of the bed; still wearing his school shirt, shucked up to the elbows, blazer laid carefully on the covers by Remus's feet. He blinks at Remus from behind his glasses, studies him for a long moment, and then sets the book down on the bedside table.

This isn't the only time they do this. It's not even how it started; it started, Remus recalls with enduring, fantastic clarity, at a Christmas party in Fifth Year, down in the hall, right here at school. Sirius had looted a bottle of rum from somewhere behind the kitchens and was tearing around the dancefloor with a similarly inebriated Peter, neither one of them paying attention to Remus and his insistence that he needed some fresh air. James had walked him outside; through the galleries and out of the school's towering oak doors, thrown open to the cold December night. They'd stood there on the threshold for a while, Remus greedily sucking in the air whilst James tapped a packet of cigarettes against his palm and shook one out, lighting it with a match, as he did in those days, in a way that Remus found to be both laughably pretentious and marvellous at the same time; he found himself feeling disappointed, somehow, when James finally bought a fluid lighter a year later. Remus had asked for a cigarette, there on the steps of the school, and James had passed him one, and then - as Remus held it carefully between his lips - had leaned in to press the end of his own light to it, cupping his hands around the glow against the winter breeze. There was an electricity between them in that moment; something Remus couldn't remember having felt before, and he would never be sure why it was that night - that party, that shared packet of cigarettes - that sparked the change. James had looked at Remus, and Remus had looked back and held his cigarette loosely between two fingers at his side, and then either one or both of them had moved and James's lips had pressed firmly against Remus's. It was a quick thing; a warm, heavy hand on the side of Remus's neck, and then James murmuring something about going back inside so Remus didn't get cold. And that was the first time.

The second, and third times, had been on nights like this, with Remus tired and weak in James's bed and James holding himself over him and laying a palm to his feverish cheek. His eyes bore into Remus now, an aching, unbearable hold that takes his breath away, always, and then James is leaning down and pressing a slow, unhurried kiss to his lips. It lasts a moment longer than last time, and a good deal longer than the time before that. That's how it goes; each time a little more earnest, a little more sure. A varying pressure and, lately, a soft, audible exhalation from Remus that could be a sigh, or a moan, or a plea for James to go further. To chase away the last of his sickness with more kisses, more heavy hands on his neck and his chest and his waist. He knows, rationally, that this ends with them sleeping together. It couldn't end any other way, and Remus finds such bliss in the knowledge that they're barely through the first term of Seventh Year and that by next summer - or spring, even, at this rate - they'll be sleeping together.

James pulls back wordlessly when the moment finds its natural end, and then he's walking smartly back to the bathroom to return with a flannel, damp and cool, which he traces over Remus's forehead, drawing the fever away somehow and leaving Remus feeling soothed and happy, sinking back into the feather pillows. There's a soft thud as James brings his usual armchair further round the side of the bed, so that he might watch Remus as he falls asleep, and then he's dimming the bedside lamp and finding Remus's clammy hand under the blankets. As ever.

A shaft of bright light spills across the bed some time later, Remus still teetering in a hinterland between sleep and listening to the steady, even breathing from James beside him. He hears him snap at the others in a low voice as they hurriedly push the door closed behind them, and Peter mumbling some apology, and then he's away; the heavy draught of sleep lulling him down, anchoring him there in James's feather mattress. 

So warm, so safe, so wonderful.


End file.
